Implosion of Time: Body, Emotions, and Terror in the Neoliberal Civilization in Chile

Abstract

This work focuses on lived experience during the development of Chilean neoliberalism at the end of twentieth century. It first describes its origins, derived from the experiment carried out by the civic-military regime in Chile since 1975, which would mature in the 1990s with the Concertación Government. Time is imagined as a production of meaning from the body based on an emotion, fear, and on a specific type, terror, in two different contexts. Research about different aspects of time by Heidegger, Husserl, Bloch, Hartog, Safransky, and Carr—and about terror, body, and emotions by Korstanje, Scribano, Feierstein, Bauman, and so on—is theoretically projected onto this particular, abovementioned, context, showing that they are configured as remembrance and protention, diverse scales of a time paralysing the construction of a socio-political human being, according to illustrated precepts, where the way in which the body acts and disciplines the course of the past, present, and future emotionally closes other possible options for autonomous production, imposing risk as a structure of freedom and happiness.